Meg Ford

Monday, August 22, 2016

I arrived at GUADEC a few days early to participate in the Board and AdBoard meetings.

Incoming and Outgoing Board Members

On my first full day in Karlsruhe the board met to slog through a long list of agenda items. We started the meeting with some team-building exercises. In general I hate team building, but Nuritzi's exercises weren't too bad. As part of one of them I told a story about a carved table a sculptor friend recently gave me:

Table with Carving of Coelacanth by Christopher Tucker

After the ice breakers were done, we sat down and went through outstanding tasks on the Board's to-do list. Some of the outstanding items were re-assigned to new board members, some were closed, and some were discussed. Cosimo took the task of asking the community how we should use the Privacy funds. It's a priority for us to put the funds to use, so tomorrow during the weekly board meeting we are going to review the community's feedback and decide on next steps. Another item we discussed during the meeting was how to create a standard code of conduct for GNOME events, so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time. Allan, Nuritzi, and I worked on first steps towards that during the second day of the Diversity BoF.

On the main conference days I attended talks and a few unconferences, and met with some of the other members of the LAS GNOME team to work out the conference schedule. The local team did a fantastic job organizing the conference, and there were a lot of nice touches (like ice cream and the pool). Many of the talks were interesting, and it was nice to catch up a bit on what is happening in GNOME, and where people are interested in taking it in the future. Kudos to the GUADEC team for getting the talks uploaded so quickly. Some of my favorite talks from the conference were:

After the main conference I attended the Diversity BoF. On the first day we formed a diversity working group and defined a mission statement. We spent the remaining time brainstorming around the first point of the mission statement, which is to attract newcomers from underrepresented and marginalized groups. Here is an etherpad with notes from the first day (thanks to Philip Chimento for taking notes and emailing them to participants). The second day of the BoF we focused on forming a working group for the code of conduct. Allan, Rosanna, Nuritzi, Marina, and I signed up as core members of the group, and Cosimo, Benjamin Berg, and Federico signed up as supporting members. As our first action we sent an email to the board outlining the process we want use to put together the code of conduct, including how we will solicit feedback and ideas from the community, review resources, and present drafts of the CoC to the board and to GNOME foundation members. If things go as planned, we will send an email soon to the foundation list, asking for more volunteers as well as feedback and resources from the community.

As always, it was great to see everyone! Hope to see you all next GUADEC.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

On Saturday, April 26th, there is going to be an Open Source Comes to Campus event at Northeastern Illinois University. It's open to all students. I've been helping a bit with organizing it and I'll be mentoring at the event. If you'd like to learn the basics and make your first contribution to FOSS, please follow the link below and sign up :) http://chicago.openhatch.org/#signup

Friday, April 4, 2014

I'm going to be running a GNOME and LUG booth tomorrow at Flourish! Other members of the LUG -- Jim Campbell, Lincoln Bryant, and eviljoel -- are also going to be stopping by to help out at various points during the day. One of our group's founding members, Chris Webber (MediaGoblin*) is speaking about The Road Ahead for Network Freedom at 2 pm so I'm skipping out on booth-tending for that. If you are around, be sure to come by and say hello to us :)

* I've helpfully linked to the MediaGoblin campaign page, in case you forgot to donate :)

Saturday, February 8, 2014

LUG + Hack Saturday, February 22nd We'll be meeting on Saturday, February 22nd at Pumping Station: One (3519 N Elston, Chicago). If you'd like to come by early and hack we should be there at around 12 pm. Formal talks will start at 2 pm. Lincoln Bryant of the University of Chicago will give a talk on how university sysadmins use Puppet to manage their servers. We may have an additional speaker lined-up within the next few days. You can RSVP on meetup.com.Chipy Project NightChipy has their first monthly project night coming up on Thursday, February 27th from 6:30 pm to 9 pm at Braintree (111 N Canal St, Suite 455, Chicago).RSVP: meetup again :)

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Today Opensource.com published an article I wrote about my experiences as a FOSS contributor, the strategies I've learned to promote diversity, and why I feel diversity is important. If that kind of topic interests you you can read it :)

Monday, January 6, 2014

We'll be having the monthly Chicago LUG meeting on Saturday, January 18th, at 2 pm, at Pumping Station: One (3517 N Elston Ave, Chicago, IL). Drew Fustini (Element 14) will be presenting on Beaglebone Black, a hackable development platform similar to the Raspberry Pi, but built using open hardware.

I'm planning to show up at noon to hack on GNOME stuff (you can show up too), and there will most likely be some hacking time after Drew's talk.

Sunday, December 8, 2013

We will be meeting at Pumping Station: One (3519 N. Elston, Chicago) this coming Saturday, December 14th, at 12 pm.We're back to our earlier start time and will be hanging around and celebrating the holidays until 5 pm. Jeff Schoeder (The Graphite Project and a GNOMEr) will be doing a talk on Graphite. Graphite stores numeric time-series data, and renders graphs of the data on demand. Bonnie King (Fermilab) will be presenting on Red Hat Software Collections, and how they are packaged and used in Scientific Linux. Afterward we'll have a christmas cookie exchange (just kidding) and generally celebrate. You can RSVP on meetup.com.

Jim Campbell has said something about having a potluck, with details being worked out on the mailing list. There isn't going to be hacking at the meeting this time, but it's been so long since I've had any hacking time that I might sneak into a quiet corner and hack anyway :)

Erik Johnson's talk on SaltStack from last month is posted now. Thanks again to Erik for speaking, and to Carl Karsten of Next Day Video for donating his time :)